"[The bill] would require most public workers to pay half their pension costs — typically 5.8% of pay for state workers — and at least 12% of their health care costs. It applies to most state and local employees but does not apply to police, firefighters and state troopers, who would continue to bargain for their benefits.
Except for police, firefighters and troopers, raises would be limited to inflation unless a bigger increase was approved in a referendum. The non-law enforcement unions would lose their rights to bargain over anything but wages, would have to hold annual elections to keep their organizations intact and would lose the ability to have union dues deducted from state paychecks.
Now why would this be? /.../
is it because teachers tend to vote pretty reliably for Democrats and public safety employees don't? Bingo."

"Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state’s budget prospects even in the long run: contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there’s not much room for further pay squeezes.
So it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.
In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.
Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions."

"Public sector workers are not, on average, grossly overpaid compared with the private sector — period. You can fiddle at the edges of this conclusion, but it’s just not possible to conclude, based on any honest assessment of the data, that schoolteachers are the new welfare queens."

"As Wisconsin’s governor and public employees square off in the biggest public sector labor showdown since Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981, government employees’ unions in a range of states are weighing whether to give ground on wages, benefits and work rules to preserve basic bargaining rights.
It is not yet clear whether Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin will succeed in his quest to strip public employee unions of most of their bargaining rights. But by simply pressing the issue, he has already won major concessions that would have been unthinkable just a month ago.
Some of Wisconsin’s major public sector unions, faced with what they see as a threat to their existence, have decided to accept concessions that they had been vigorously fighting: they said they would agree to have more money deducted from workers’ paychecks to go toward their pensions and health benefits, translating into a pay cut of around 7 percent.
But Mr. Walker is not settling for that. He said that those concessions were 'an interesting development, because a week ago they said that’s not acceptable.'"

"I don't doubt that Scott Walker genuinely wants to close Wisconsin's short-term deficit, and he also thinks that busting the public union will make it easier to curtail spending over the long run. On the other hand, you have to be pretty naive to ignore his political motivations."

"As labor battles erupt in state capitals around the nation, a majority of Americans say they oppose efforts to weaken the collective bargaining rights of public employee unions and are also against cutting the pay or benefits of public workers to reduce state budget deficits, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
Labor unions are not exactly popular, though: A third of those surveyed viewed them favorably, a quarter viewed them unfavorably, and the rest said they were either undecided or had not heard enough about them."

"As Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker tries to strip away the collective bargaining rights of public-sector unions, many liberals have latched onto the idea that his real goal is to dismantle the labor movement and the infrastructure of the Democratic Party. That is almost certainly one of his aims, but it’s not the whole story.
Walker also has an economic vision for his state—one which is common currency in the Republican Party today, but hitherto alien in a historically progressive, unionist Midwestern state like Wisconsin. It is based on a theory of economic growth that is not only anti-statist but aggressively pro-corporate: relentlessly focused on breaking the backs of unions; slashing worker compensation and benefits; and subsidizing businesses in order to attract capital from elsewhere and avoid its flight to even more benighted locales. Students of economic development will recognize it as the 'smokestack-chasing' model of growth adopted by desperate developing countries around the world, which have attempted to use their low costs and poor living conditions as leverage in the global economy. And students of American economic history will recognize it as the 'Moonlight and Magnolias' model of development, which is native to the Deep South."

"“There is tremendous frustration with the influence of
out-of-state organizations and out-of-state money,” Lisa Graves, the
executive director of the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy,
told me when I spoke with her this spring. “Wisconsin has an identity,
the Wisconsin Idea, that is based on the notion that legislation should
help as many people as possible.” In February, David Koch gave $1
million to the Republican Governors Association, which is spending
heavily to fight Walker’s recall campaign, and that same month he
praised Walker’s anti-union legislation in The Palm Beach Post. “We’re
helping him, as we should,” Koch said. “We’ve spent a lot of money in
Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.” Walker has raised more than $25
million for his campaign, 60 percent of it from outside the state, while
his Democratic opponent, Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee (whom
Walker defeated in a regular election less than two years ago), has
raised less than $1 million. “Wisconsin used to be the beacon of clean
and open and honest government,” Mike McCabe, the head of the
nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks money in
politics, told me. “We are now just a pawn on a national chessboard.”"